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Live Blogging – NY:MIEG Breakfast event- “Shifting the Paradigm: Young Women with Cool Jobs Making a Difference in Digital Media”

Moderator: Limor Schafman
Natali Del Conte – C|Net
Allison Mooney – Fleishman Hillard’s Youth & Mobile Marketing (Next Great Thing)
Kelly Hafner – WEtv
Romina Rosado -The News Market
Mindy Spire -WWE

Limor: Convergence of Media, content, people (community) sector
All three coming together to create a new level of story, interaction that we haven’t seen.
We’re also going to address the age and gender issues.

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Business business development Legal meetings NYSIA social media socialmedia

NYSIA Legal Forum and Special Interest Group – Live Blogging Notes

NYSIA Legal Forum Summary – Live Blogging

Guest: Mark Grossman – Attorney and “TechLaw” Columnist

The industry should be embarrased – contracts are horrible, not so much one-sided as incompetently drawn, fail to address basic questions. VERY often, the contract delivered is not the deal the parties wanted to do. Most business litigation is honest business people, honestly disagreeing about their items that are unclear.
You have to be on the same page – legal review helps you – lack of attention to details will bite you later – it is a safety net. But sometimes people agree to agree later.

Sellers are in the best position to put out the first draft for a deal. Good form documents are helpful for you to close and seal a deal.

Assumption: assume that no one at the table will be involved after the parties sign, the doc stands on its own, and its well written and could be understood by people not familiar with the details. Who do you write for- the judge, the (high school and college educated) jury, who? – Work with assumption that everyone who negotiated will not be there but have the same skill set – and they could read the document and understand it.

Mark now shows 6 basic questions for a software dev contract – responsibilities, procedures for feedback, corrections and changes; procedures for final acceptance; price and when it’s paid; who owns the copyright and ip rights; remedies for delay or failure.
Who’s responsible for: text, graphics, look and feel, layout. Is it defined?

Licensing – who licences 3rd party software? Who does due dilligence on underlying licenses now?

What’s the procedure for change orders? – must create procedures for collaboration

Changes require approval of both parties, needs to deal with timelines, mechanisms for adjusting price, do not get sloppy with procedure – creates litigation.

Procedure for final acceptance – including functions, speed, and response time. Have to think about failed tests – procedures, time for fixing, etc. What happens if parties never agree it works.

What’s the price for the work when it is paid? – flat fees – more work up front to clearly delinate the scope.
Is it based on time? What’s hourly rate? Time to completion? Require regular updates on time to date.

When is payment due? Dates vs milestones.

Who owns the copyrights and other IP rights in a website?
buyer – “I paid for it – how come I don’t own it?” vs developer – “losing rights to my own programming library.”
Work made for hire – unless agreement says the buyer owns it, the seller owns it.
If doing outsourced work, even if venue for law is New York, always check with foreign lawyer.

Remedies for delay or failure – careful balance needed. If customer doesn’t provide what’s needed on time, like logos, graphics, etc. developer can’t deliver on time.

Whose law should apply? NY can be a compromise state.

Magic language- time is of the essence – – Courts don’t like to enforce time limits, but putting this in can make court put higher priority on timeline. (Shouldn’t be acceptable to a seller).

Where and how to battle – Lawsuit, arbitration, attorney fees to the victor?

Norms on limitation of liability – no matter what we do and how bad it is, we owe you little, and you owe us first born.

Limits on liability – from seller – it’s a price issue, its an industry standard, we’ve never done it any other way, we can’t be possibly responsibile for all the harm our software would do if it failed. You have to have backups in place.

Buyer’s perspective – full amount of contract or more, exclude 3rd party property damage and bodily injury, exclude liability for infringement of IP, exclude NDA liability, reciprocal.

In general, great presentation, very informative, I learned a lot.

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social media social networks socialmedia

The E.Factor – a niche social network for Entrepreneurs

You may have noticed a new widget on the left column of my blog – representing a map of my usage in the E.Factor, a niche social network for Entrepreneurs. I’m excited to show my support for E.Factor, as I know the principals involved, and respect them as successful entrepreneurs and investors. They’ve asked me to be one of the E.Factor “coaches” – someone who can help others to advance their businesses or ideas. I’m privileged to join and pitch in where I can.
One nice feature in E.Factor for the investor is that entrepreneurs can’t grab them directly. They can request contact, and investors can look at entrepreneur’s idea or plan before they get in touch.
If you’re looking to meet other entrepreneurs, or to find investors in an environment where there’s some respect, some good people and features like visual chat and lounge in which to meet others, you might check E.Factor out. An advantage to being early in a social network is that the early
adopters can have more and deeper connections in the network. So, if you’re thinking of joining, this is a good time. They’re at about 39,100 members, and looking to get to 40,000 this week.
My linking policy on E.Factor is that I’ll link to anyone who requests it, as long as they have a profile I can read and understand. (A few folks who have linked to me who had no profiles and one who looked like a multi-level marketer, I’ve refused.)

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blogging marketing PR social media socialmedia

Marvel Comics pisses off core audience

Who is the core audience of “Iron Man” the movie? Geeks. Computer hugging, email sending, twittering geeks. Geeks with big Mac Book Pros who have money to spend.
And the pied piper of the Web 2.0 geeks, Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, had invited geeks to a special pre-screening of the movie. And Mike got the theater to pre-screen by CALLING THEIR GROUP SALES LINE! And TechCrunch is really, really well read in the Web 2.0 community and even by analysts and Wall Street types. (According to Alexa.com, it’s the 1700th most read site on the net – nothing to sneeze at, and rumors have it they’re making 6 figures a month in ad revenue).

So, seeing as an influencer has decided to lead core audience into a screening of their product, which would likely have generated an additional PR storm of good pr (assuming the movie is good), Marvel has gone and shut the whole thing down. They’ve sent a cease-and-desist to Mike (a lawyer himself) telling him not to do this.Mike posted this story about 6pm pacific, about 15 minutes ago as I write this. There are already over 70 comments against Marvel on his site.

PR People – Call your Lawyers and stop the bleeding now! This is stupid. You can’t control the message anymore. Let the people see your movie when they’re scheduled to see it, and salvage what you get. You’re already looking at newspaper headlines – “Marvel tells SF Fans to wait”, “Marvel alienates core geek audience” – instead of “Iron Man gets first weekend boost from SF Twitters and bloggers gushing about movie.” Really.

Update from TechCrunch: Seems it was all just a big misunderstanding, and partly Oracle’s fault.

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Business Entreprenurship howardgr marketing NextNY social media socialmedia

My Newsletter Strategy

Today I released the first monthly newsletter for the Harbrooke Group. If you want to subscribe and haven’t received an opt-in email (of course we did an opt-in, that’s permission marketing in action) please sign up on the newsletter tab above.

Why a newsletter? I have many friends who are all over Twitter, Facebook, and other social tools like Utterz and Seesmic, but for many of my contacts, email is still a primary communications tool. Not everyone of you regularly reads blogs, and for those who do, not everyone can keep track of all the blogs they want to. So, the newsletter is a way for me  point you to articles I’ve written that may have value in your business, but you may have missed. I also point to other smart thinkers whose work I enjoy.

The newsletter is also the answer to the question “what have you been up to?” I have been reaching out to a lot of people for everthing from my upcoming college reunion to going through my address book looking for people I haven’t talked to in a while, and this is the inevitable question. So, the newsletter is a way to keep a monthly presence in the lives of people who I care about as business connections or friends.

Finally, I’ve suggested that clients associate a newsletter with their blogs, and it is time I stepped up to do so too.

So far, just the feedback from the opt-in email has been fantastic, with connection notes from about 10 people I haven’t heard from in a while. That alone would be a great value for this effort. But, the ultimate goal is having you read what I’ve written and learn something. And if you like that, to have you pass me on to someone else who might do the same. If there’s work that I can do for you, or for that person, all the better.

Please let me know what you think of the newsletter, and share it with a friend if you have a moment. Thanks.